With the upcoming release of Ubuntu 12.04 and the attention ubuntu got on tech blogs lately it's very likely IMO, that ubuntu will get a lot of new users (even if it's just people trying).

Since a lot of the problems of first time 'ubuntuers' are quite easy fixes and mostly involve stuff about drivers (graphics,printers, other peripherals), software recommendations and general usage questions, wouldn't it be a good idea to create a 'new-user' tag to easily find these rather easy but important questions.
At the same time it gives us a hint to write our solutions more verbose for these tags and explain what's happening and not just simply post a link to a man page.

I think this would improve the speed at which these types of questions would be resolved and with that take a lot of frustration from the new user as well as strengthen their faith in the ubuntu community.

For this to really work out there should be a notification when you log into askubuntu for the first time, that promotes this tag.
Anyone think this is an idea worth discussing?

1 Answer
1

The incoming easy ones can easily be marked as duplicates, and the site automatically recommends duplicates to them. Every release we get crushed by new users and we manage to scale quite well, most of the most common questions have good answers and we regularly check those so it shouldn't be any more crazy than it usually is.

Answers should always be more verbose and easy for the user to understand, wether they are new or not. (An answer that is a link to a manpage doesn't sound like an acceptable answer anyway.)

One way you can help new users is by reviewing/editing incoming new questions. If you contribute enough edits and get access to the Review tab there's a section for new incoming questions from first time users. I try to check these every day. Here's some information if you want to get started: